LG Optimus Black - Shining Black (Updated!)

** Updated on 7th July 2011 **

The article has been updated with performance benchmarks conducted on a retail unit, thus updating the earlier preview to a final review with ratings given for the LG Optimus Black.

Looking Prime in Black

What is the LG Optimus Black? One thing's for sure, it has no relation to the iconic leader of the Transformers' heroic Autobots. The Optimus Black represents the company's continued focus on design excellence. While first impressions do count, what lies beneath, i.e. the hardware and software, still matters greatly to the consumer. As such, the Optimus Black also adds a few bells and whistles to its repertoire.

First seen in our , what we've had in our labs for sometime was the pre-production unit of the Optimus Black. As such in our initial preview article, we reserved our comments for its performance to a later date when the retail unit was ready for review.  Finally after the busy June period when all the major launches subsided, we managed to find some quality time to review the LG Optimus Black in detail. To start off, we'll take a quick look at the concept behind its design, and what you can expect from the features of the Optimus Black.

Looking purely at the exterior, the Optimus Black takes on a minimalistic approach to its design. Other than the LG branding placed prominently at the top, you won't find anymore markings across its chassis. Once it's awakened from its standby mode, its four main icons for home, menu, back and search will be lit up and presented below its 4-inch display.

Along the borders, the inconspicuous buttons can be challenging to locate, given how it's fully flushed to the body. That said, we had to fumble around the edges to locate the volume buttons. Right below the volume buttons, we spotted an unfamiliar button, which was later revealed to be its gesture button. We'll be explaining more of its function in the following features page. Surprisingly, we found no camera button on the device, which means you'll have to rely on the touch screen interface to activate, focus and shoot with its 8-megapixel camera.

The crown of the Optimus Black is occupied by the power button, a 3.5mm audio port and a slider cover that protects the microUSB port. Of these three, we favored the slider cover for its practicality, joining the  as one of the rare few devices that adopts such a design concept. Its power button, however, did give us quite a headache to depress with its flushed design.

Officially, the Optimus Black's profile measures in at 9.2mm. Upon closer inspection, the thickness isn't uniform across the device, with a tapered edge along the borders. This does give the impression that the Optimus Black is thinner along the edges, which measures at 6mm according to LG. Its weight, or the lack of it, was one of the first few aspects we noticed when we held the Optimus Black in our hands. Not expecting the feather light weight that comes with it, we handled the Optimus Black with care, hoping it won't crumble in our grip. Its body encased mostly in plastic, felt flimsy and cheap overall. This is a far cry from LG's previous smartphones, such as the that combines a fine mixture of glass, plastic and metal to create a premium feel to the device.

This Optimus Has the Touch Gesture

Every smartphone has its own unique features, and that is quite true for the Optimus Black. As mentioned earlier, we will be explaining how the gesture button functions. The name by itself is a giveaway - gestures are used as a control mechanism to interact with the Optimus Black. How the gesture button is used can be customized within the settings panel. This could range from holding the gesture button and swaying the phone left or right to alternate between pages, or just simply holding it and picking up the phone to answer an incoming call.

Even without the gesture button being held onto, you can also flip the phone over to mute an incoming call, snooze an alarm or pause a video. In fact, the whole phone is a controller. Double tapping either the left or right side will let you rewind or skip to the next track on your music list, while a single tap will move your images along when you view them in the gallery. These gesture controls aren't exactly new, given how Samsung did it previously with the .

On the user interface (UI) front, there are some improvements. With Google Android 2.2 preloaded (and a confirmed future Android 2.3 update) on the Optimus Black, LG banks on the flexibility of the open source mobile OS to park its Optimus UI 2.0 onto the Optimus Black. Like most Android smartphones, customizing the interface is easy and intuitive by simply holding an icon and dragging it to the respective pages. Four apps or features can also be parked as permanent shortcuts. At this point, there's no doubt that the Optimus UI borrows heavily from a few earlier designs, that being the  and to name a few.

That's not to say that there aren't any observable differences on the Optimus UI. There are three different menu layouts for you to choose from - category, page and list. The page layout is quite familiar, with all your apps listed onto various pages. Likewise, the list layout isn't a stranger, listing the apps from top to bottom, though we did spot an alphabet sidebar that lets you skip to an app based on their alphabet.

Its category layout is the real focus, allowing you to customize your apps according to their functions. By default, you start off with two basic categories - applications and downloads. Adding more categories will definitely help in searching for your desired app, such as the YouTube or Music app which can be parked under a multimedia category. We are definitely in agreement with the category concept, though you have to exercise caution and not overload the menu with categories that could mess up the layout.

As mentioned, what we have here is a pre-production unit, thus we'll have to end our preview right here. Fortunately, we won't have to wait too long, as LG has stated that the Optimus Black will be available by April 2011. retailing for S$768. Once we get our hands on a retail unit, we'll be commencing with our usual performance benchmark tests, giving you a better idea of how this svelte Android smartphone fares against the barrage of devices coming our way in 2011.

The Power Within

The Optimus Black belongs to the average smartphone category, with a single-core Texas Instrument (TI) OMAP 3630 1GHz processor acting as the brains behind the operation. This is a stark contrast to its faster cousin, the , which has the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1GHz processor under the hood.

Nonetheless, single-core processors have performed their tasks just as well, from what we've seen on earlier devices such as the . To put its performance into numbers, we'll be subjecting the Optimus Black to our usual benchmark apps:

• The first benchmark is Quadrant, which measures the device's performance based on its CPU, I/O and GPU. Simply put, Quadrant is a benchmark that gives you a general idea of how your device performs against other Android devices.
  
   
• The second benchmark is NeoCore, targeting the device's GPU performance.

These benchmarks, as we've mentioned in our earlier reviews, are a rough gauge on the device's performance. Its usability varies according to user preference, but it does provide a median performance level to help gauge where it stands amongst other similar phones. Our tests were conducted from a fresh reboot of the Optimus Black. To get a better understanding of how the Optimus Black stands against similar devices, we compared it against the following Android devices - Samsung Nexus S, HTC Incredible S, and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc.

The Optimus Black was placed as the weakest of the four Android devices, with its Quadrant and NeoCore scores marked at 1231 and 46fps. To shed some light on these lower numbers, remember that the Optimus Black is running on Google Android 2.2 and uses a different processor from the Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 processor found on the Incredible S and Xperia Arc. To put it plainly, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors look to have an edge over those from the TI variant.

As we've mentioned, Quadrant does measure the overall performance, and thus the device's memory comes into play. With only 512MB RAM loaded on the Optimus Black, it's not surprising to see the numbers falling short of what is seen on the Xperia Arc and Incredible S. Its NeoCore result has also shown it to be the weakest, clocking in at 46fps while the rest are reporting at least 55fps in the benchmark.

We do have doubts on the optimization of its single-core processor. At times, the Optimus Black lacked the responsiveness we're used to on other 1GHz devices. Screen transitions and apps switching was average at best, and at times we noticed a slight lag as we handled the different menus within the device. To get a better feel of how its CPU and GPU perform, we ran a game of Angry Birds and Dungeon Defenders. Bird tossing was mostly a smooth affair. But we are not singing the same tune with Dungeon Defenders, with frame rates looking lower than usual.

In Brightest Day

The Optimus Black's unique proposition comes from its Nova display, an IPS panel which the company claims has a brightness level of 700 nits and reduces power consumption by 50 percent. Now, the former claim is definitely true, given how we had to keep the display brightness relatively low. Under direct sunlight, the Optimus Black managed to have good screen legibility even at a moderate brightness level of 50%. Eventually, we realized it's not exactly a good idea to leave the device on auto-brightness, since it tends to overcompensate and blinded us when we were indoors.

Screen brightness aside, the Optimus Black sports a 4.0-inch display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. While there's nothing game-changing over these specifications, the device was sufficient to bring out the clarity and sharpness of images and movies played on it. Sound quality was average, giving a modest showing of its multimedia performance.

The Optimus Black doesn't go out of its way to impress in the imaging sector, choosing a 5-megapixel camera and a single LED to do its imaging chores. Fortunately, we got some good results from the camera. Images were well-balanced along the color spectrum, while details were mostly up to par from what we saw on the resolution chart. Great for general shots, we say, but that's about it.

As for its battery life, we conducted our usual battery tests to ascertain LG's claims. Our testing methodology involves test video with a 480 x 800 resolution looping under the following conditions:

• Screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connection active
• Constant data stream via email and Twitter

To ascertain the company's claims against AMOLED devices, we gathered the data from our earlier test done on the Samsung Galaxy S as a comparison point. To give a better gauge, we also included the Samsung Nexus S, which is essentially the S-LCD variant of the Galaxy S, and the HTC Incredible S with similar display size and specifications.

The numbers do speak for themselves. Against the Samsung Galaxy S and its Super AMOLED display, the Optimus Black paled in comparison. Our earlier data from the first production batch of the HTC Desire using an AMOLED screen also refuted LG's power efficiency claim of its Nova display. While the Optimus Black was lacking in battery mileage, its overall weight and dimensions managed to give it an edge over the Samsung Nexus S in the portability index. While it does come in close to the HTC Desire's numbers, it has quite a fair bit to catch up against the Samsung Galaxy S.

With different panels such as IPS, AMOLED and S-LCD under comparison, the test parameters aim to keep the data under strict control. But here's some food for thought: the Optimus Black's maximum brightness is relatively higher than its counterparts. While our test parameters are kept consistent to get a fair assessment on the battery performance, it is understandable that power consumption is increased with a higher brightness level. As such, the lower scores from the Optimus Black's battery life is not a surprise, and given how we've mentioned that the screen can be a tad blinding, you'll most likely keep the brightness to a minimum level and thus get a slightly better overall mileage.

This is relfected in our real-world usage of the Optimus Black. This includes the usual calls, SMS, web browsing and apps loading on both the Wi-Fi and 3G networks. Lasting slightly more than a full day, this is a subjective indication of how the device should work for the average user, and it could vary if you focus more on data usage.

Black Lights the Way

The minimalistic approach of the LG Optimus Black , coupled with its thin profile, scored some points with us. However, Its profile isn't uniform across the device, with a tapered edge along the border creating an illusion of slimness. Its feather light weight and a mostly plastic body lacked the premium feel that's often associated with its portfolio. Unfortunately, the device escaped our grip too easily. Once it struck the ground, its flimsy casing is easily flung off, with the battery dislodged from its contact points just as quickly.

Most of its physical buttons are found in the usual spots, where the crown of the device is occupied by the power button, a 3.5mm audio port and a slider cover that protects the microUSB port. Of these three, we favored the slider cover for its practicality. Touch-sensitive buttons are back in action, with its four main icons for home, menu, back and search lighting up and presented below its 4-inch display once the device is awakened.

Below the volume buttons located on the left, we spotted the gesture button. How the gesture button is used can be customized within the settings panel. This could range from holding the gesture button and swaying the phone left or right to alternate between pages, or just simply holding it and picking up the phone to answer an incoming call. As mentioned, this gesture feature is more of a gimmick than practical, and is something that you can live without.

The Optimus Black and its exterior might be as dark as its name implies, but underneath, it shines literally. The generous 4-inch IPS display greets you with a maximum brightness of 700 nits. In truth, even with its automatic brightness setting, it could prove to be too straining on your eyes and a drain on the battery unnecessarily. While it is great for the bright outdoors, it is too glaring when you are indoors with a softer lighting.

Its overall performance was somewhat lacking from what we know of devices loaded with single-core processors. The daily handling of its apps and screen transitions were indicative of how the device was lacking in responsiveness, while the Quadrant and Neocore scores did report lower numbers against similar devices.

Due to its bright display, we were expecting slightly lower results for our routine battery tests. Running at 3 hours 33 minutes, its numbers were lower than similar single core 1GHz smartphones crossing the 5 hour mark in our intensive tests. However, we did get a day's mileage out of the Optimus Black for standard use. At times, it did not respond well to our touch gestures, but managed to prove its worth as a multimedia player with smooth video playback and decent audio reproduction.

The LG Optimus Black does not present itself as a premium device, nor does it have the raw power of a dual-core smartphone. As such, we are less inclined to pay the full S$768 for this device, but a 2-year contract with the right service provider should soften the impact.

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